Author Archive for: ‘Tag Gallagher’

Screening the Past > Articles by: Tag Gallagher

Reading, culture, and auteurs

Uploaded 1 March 2001 Why did it become fashionable to say we are “reading” a film? One reads a score; one hears music. One may read a score while hearing, but these are distinguishable activities. There is no way to read a movie; one sees and hears it. Reading and seeing/hearing are almost contraries. “Le roman est un récit qui …

All Lost in Wonder: Edgar G.Ulmer

Uploaded 1 March 2001 for Bill Krohn Edgar G.Ulmer (1904-72) suffered a series of strokes and toward the end of his life was almost totally paralyzed and unable to speak. These last years were his “purgatory,” his daughter Arianne recalls, “mostly because he was totally helpless to do anything for any of the people he loved so dearly. His was …

On Giovanna d’Arco al rogo (1955)

Uploaded 1 March 2000 Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s Giovanna d’Arco One would expect godless and nihilistic attitudes to be at antipodes with those of a very Catholic miracle play. In fact, this is not the case. Giovanna d’Arco al rogo (“Joan of Arc at the stake,” 1955), Roberto Rossellini’s mise en scène of an oratorio by Arthur Honegger and Paul …

Going My Way

Uploaded 1 December 2001 | Modified Friday, 11 January 2002 D-Day, 6 June 1944. John Ford was there. Twenty years later, he said it was the most vivid experience of his life: Not that I or any other man who was there can give a panoramic wide-angle view of the first wave of Americans who hit the beach that morning. …

Mizoguchi and Freedom

Uploaded 1 December 2001 How inadequate I feel, watching Kenji Mizoguchi’s movies! I want to feel closer to his people, the way I feel close to John Ford’s cowboys, Jean Renoir’s cancan dancers, Carl Dreyer’s bigots, F.W. Murnau’s Polynesians, King Vidor’s blacks, Roberto Rossellini’s partisans – any of whom feel no less “alien” to me than Mizoguchi’s Japanese, medieval or …

Geometry of Force: Abel Ferrara and Simone Weil

Uploaded 30 June 2000 The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could …